2016 Christmas Ukraine power outage was caused by hackers

Ukrenergo confirmed that preliminary results of its investigation showed that the Ukraine power outage occurred in December was caused by hackers.

In December 2016, the Government Ukraine energy company Ukrenergo suffered a severe power outage that affected the ”North” substation at Pivnichna. The incident caused blackouts in the city of Kiev and neighboring regions.

The head of the NEC “Ukrenergo” Vsevolod Kovalchuk explained in a message posted on Facebook that experts at the company were able to restore power in 30 minutes with a manual procedure. According to Kovalchuk, the operations were fully restored after just over an hour.

Kovalchuk pointed out that an equipment malfunction or a cyber attack can be the cause of the problem. According to Kovalchuk, an “external interference through the data network” could have caused the power outage.

In a statement sent via email to SecurityWeek on this, Ukrenergo confirmed that preliminary results of its investigation showed that the normal operation of workstations and SCADA systems had been disrupted due to “external influences.”

Once broken in the target network, attackers used a malware to gain a remote control of systems at the power plant. Experts are still investigating to establish a timeline of events and identify the entry point of the hackers. They don’t exclude that the threat could still be inside the target network in a dormant state.

The company is working to secure its system by implementing organizational and technological measures that would make its systems resilient to further attacks.

“The cyber-security company Information Systems Security Partners (ISSP) has linked the incident to a hack and blackout in 2015 that affected 225,000.” reported the BBC. “ISSP, a Ukrainian company investigating the incidents on behalf of Ukrenergo, now appears to be suggesting a firmer link.

It said that both the 2015 and 2016 attacks were connected, along with a series of hacks on other state institutions this December, including the national railway system, several government ministries and a national pension fund.

Oleksii Yasnskiy, head of ISSP labs, said: “The attacks in 2016 and 2015 were not much different – the only distinction was that the attacks of 2016 became more complex and were much better organised.“”

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Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer.
Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US.
Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines.
Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.